Читать книгу Life Underwater - Ken Barris - Страница 7

Eli

I am back from South Africa now, poorer than I was before. My father is dead and buried in the old country, my mother emptied out. I should never have given up smoking at this point: mourning and nicotine withdrawal make for an agonising combination. I won’t bore the world by writing down how I feel, but I need to collect myself again, to find the shards of selfhood I’ve left scattered behind me. I cannot say how this will turn out for health and sanity – it might prove to be a very bad idea – but here goes.

Perhaps this is my earliest memory: In my grandfather’s house are two empty tortoiseshells. They were once giant mountain tortoises, big enough for a child to ride on. Now they are cleaned out and polished, odourless, speckled with dust. No pink meat or ropy entrails, no blood or marrow. This is exactly what turns them into memory, this purification, this purging of everything complex or prone to rot. There are no tortoise gonads, no beady eyes. I sit on them and rock to their empty music. Only I can hear it, no one else. The tortoises sing to me of the old bushland they inhabited, the wild animals that couldn’t kill them, the prickly pear thickets and steep kloofs lined with aloe. They sing to me of the Eastern Cape through which my grandfather drove on his donkey cart once upon a time, selling goods to farmers.

But now Wolf Machabeus is a giant mountain tortoise himself. He moves very slowly, holding on to a walking stick. His hands are swollen, the skin is shiny, stretched too thin. It looks like reddened wax or plastic. Every day he is given a squash ball, which he has to squeeze repeatedly to exercise his hands, to keep them alive. His eyes are milky. They are magnified by thick spectacles that do not help him much. His cataracts are too advanced, his retinas are detached, his optic nerve has died. He is well looked after by my aunts, his married daughters. They take turns to dress him in the thick serge suits he favours. They clean him and lay him down to sleep. Before they dress him, they rub him down with surgical spirits. The smell is wonderful.

He likes to eat borscht, soup more colourful than blood. He eats it ice-cold, with sour cream swirled into it and one hot potato resting under its glossy surface. My grandfather calls it sour soup.

“Try it,” he said to me one day. “Maybe you’ll like it.”

It set my teeth on edge, and the beetroot flavour was hard to endure as violin music. I refused to taste it ever again.

“This soup is too sour,” my grandfather complained that day. Then he added more tactfully, “But for sour soup, it is not too sour.”

He likes to listen to Sophie Tucker. The song he likes best is “My Yiddishe Momme”. When that old Columbia record is put on, he begins to weep. When Sophie Tucker stops singing and breaks into the spoken eulogy in Yiddish, he bawls. My aunts always argue about allowing him to listen to her.

“If he listens to the damn thing, he will cry,” Aunt Hannah insists.

“It gives him pleasure, let him listen,” Auntie Molly proclaims.

And so it goes on. He listens, and her voice brings on floods of tears. Nothing makes him happier. Nothing makes him more sad. When I hear the song, I try to understand his sad Yiddishe momme. What did she look like? Why does he miss her so much? After all, he is well over eighty years old, and she must have died a very long time ago. I know the house they lived in was in a country called Lithuania. I think the house was filled with brown colours and herring smells. It had small windows and a steep roof, to make the snow slide off. He left his home when he was a young man, to come to Africa. He was not even a man, he was only eighteen. He never saw her again. That is why he cries, again and again, whenever he is allowed to listen to the record. She might have been killed by Hitler, I do not know.

There are two spacious lounges in my grandfather’s house. On a walnut table in one of them rest leather-bound collections of a newspaper that was printed in biblical times, namely The Judean Chronicle. The volumes are half an inch thick, and they’re tall and wide as the Eastern Province Herald. They are filled with newspaper stories about people like Adam and Eve, Noah, Elijah, Moses, and the glorious Maccabees. There are photographs too, as in any other newspaper. They are all black and white, so Joseph wears a coat of many shades of grey. Elijah is my favourite prophet. He has a wide, round forehead, generous as a boulder, and wild frightened eyes. We leave a glass of wine for him at the door during the two Pesach meals every year, but he never comes to drink it. There are pictures of the pyramids and the People of Israel building them, slaves under the whip. There is a photo of the Tower of Babel, raised in the city of Babylon. Babel and Babylon fit together, though I don’t know exactly how.

The Tower of Babel is an unfinished building in the shape of a bucket turned upside down, with a spiral ramp going around it so that the builders could drag burnt bricks up to the top, and the slime they had as mortar, to raise it even higher. I read the words under the picture carefully: “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” I am haunted by the picture and the tower, and its unhappy ending. I do not understand God’s reasons for knocking it down and confusing everyone. Things would be so much easier if the whole world still spoke English.

I study the photograph carefully, trying to find a door or window, to work out if the tower had an inside, or if it was solid. It would be much stronger if it were solid, but you couldn’t do much with it then, other than climb the outside. But perhaps that was the only point of the whole building, to reach up to heaven itself. In that case, they wouldn’t need an inside.

The boundary wall of my grandfather’s house is lined with kaffir plums. We climb the easy branches, my cousins and I, and pick the oval fruit. We peel off the skin with our teeth – it is a tight skin, difficult to remove. Then we suck at yellow sour meat. Only a thin layer surrounds the pip, so it is not rewarding to eat. But we do it because we do it. Climbing the trees is more rewarding, and looking down on Brighton Drive, and joking with each other, or throwing kaffir plums at passing dogs. We know that “kaffir” is a cruel word, but not “kaffir plum”. There are also kaffir trees along the street, but not in the garden. They have flaming red flowers in summer. In the garden are Australian cherry bushes, with pink and pulpy berries that are even more sour. Aunt Hannah says we should eat them because they are full of vitamin C. We like to eat such great sourness, and spit out the pulp and the soft seeds, and exclaim how terrible it is. The only sweet thing in the garden is the honeysuckle creeper. We know how to pluck the flowers, bite off the green blob at the bottom and suck out the nectar. That is why they are called honeysuckles.

In front of the house are two gigantic palm trees. They tower above the roof. In summer they grow clusters of inedible orange dates. The palm trees are tall and strong and make me proud to belong in my grandfather’s house. We are safe here in Summerstrand, or almost safe, as safe as we can be for now.